317: Rethinking Friction Maps

Doing Them Right — Seeing Beyond Your Product

In 2011, when Mark Zuckerberg first described friction in the context of product design, it was about removing the micro-obstacles that prevent users from doing what they’re supposed to — signing up, uploading photos, and sharing content. Over time, the idea has matured, evolved, and expanded beyond the interface. Today, friction maps are not just UX tools. They are strategic blueprints — especially critical in ecosystems where your product is only one node among many. However, here's the problem: Most teams still build friction maps from the inside out, not the outside in.

Start From First Principles: What Is Friction?

Friction isn't just a slow-loading screen or a cluttered interface. At its core, friction is resistance—the subtle, invisible forces that stop a person from completing an intended action. And often, it has little to do with your code.

Sometimes, it’s cognitive—the mental fatigue from too many choices, too much jargon, or too many steps. At other times, it’s organizational, such as when someone’s workflow stalls because they need access approval from a manager who is on leave.

Friction can arise from an emotional history, such as a bad experience, a lack of trust, or unclear value, which makes users pause, question, or abandon. It may even come from things entirely outside the product, like a missing integration, a broken process, or a team that was never trained in the first place.

In some cases, the product works fine. But people still don’t change. That’s behavioral inertia. They don’t know how to adopt it, or more often, they don’t want to—because the cost of change, even when small, feels too high.

AI systems introduce new forms of friction. Is this model trustworthy? What data did it train on? Why did it make that decision? A bit of friction—like showing how a model made a decision (explainability)—builds user trust. But too much (constant disclaimers, vague answers) creates cognitive overload.

That’s why friction mapping cannot be reduced to a UX audit. It’s not just about the screen. It’s anthropology. It’s systems thinking. It’s understanding how humans move through technology, across organizations, and within habits and expectations.

A Change Is Coming Fast—From Inside-Out to Ecosystem-In

In a world of SaaS, APIs, and AI agents, the stack is no longer what you control—it’s what your users cobble together. The business model, the product strategy, and even your support playbook must evolve.

What’s changing is not just the tools, but the terrain. Digitization is accelerating. Crypto makes money move at the speed of the internet. AI doesn’t just automate tasks—it reshapes workflows. It unearths blind spots. It amplifies sloppiness. Friction, once tolerable, becomes visible—and then, intolerable.

“Systems become brittle when they don’t map to how people actually behave.” — Don Norman

How to Begin?

The first step is not building a friction map. It's shifting your lens. Sit with a support team. Watch a user onboard. Map what happens before your feature is touched, and after your product is closed.

AI will soon help highlight patterns—journeys that drop off, loops that repeat, tickets that spike—but human teams still need to interpret and act. The ROI lies in noticing what no dashboard shows you yet.

“People don’t resist change. They resist being changed.” — Peter Senge

Start there. Change your perspective, and the system starts to change too.